Sitemap.xml doesn't seem to be working properly [duplicate]

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• The Sitemap Paradox 19 answers

I have a sitemap.xml on one of my domains. It contains the following:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
    <loc>http://www.domain.com</loc>
    <lastmod>[date in 2013]</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
    <loc>http://www.domain.com/blog</loc>
    <lastmod>[date in 2013]</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
    <loc>http://www.domain.com/blog/blog-post-title-1/</loc>
    <lastmod>[date in 2013]</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
    <loc>http://www.domain.com/blog/blog-post-title-2/</loc>
    <lastmod>[date in 2013]</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>

Google in caching http://www.example.com perfectly but for some reason, it doesn't seem to be caching /blog very well. I would expect that the /blog would appear in the same search results that the search phrase for domain.com does - but it doesn't. It doesn't appear anywhere near the first couple pages for that search phrase (the search phrase is my personal name and it's a unique name so there's not much competition).

When I search "firstname lastname blog" - it comes up, but when I search "firstname lastname" only domain.com comes up.

Am I correct in thinking that something might be wrong with my sitemap.xml? I suspect that Google is not correctly caching /blog for some reason.

Answer 1

Am I correct in thinking that something might be wrong with my Sitemap.xml?

No. You can easily verify this by checking Google Webmaster Tools and looking at the sitemap section. If this sitemap has been submitted to GWT and is valid, it will say so. If GWT reports an error or problem with your sitemap, it will also say so. But if you can search for "name blog" and Google returns the desired result, then the site is being indexed (the correct term, by the way. "Caching" is something else entirely) and the site map is not your problem.

As for the blog not showing up on a simple "name" search that is probably due to how the pages are constructed and optimized for search engine consumption. You could be doing something that is triggering a penalty and that would explain the lack of result. It could even be that Google is not done calculating your initial ranking if this is a new site and you will start coming up if you wait a little bit.